“It’s a feel good movie that demonstrates that even during one of the vilest and most racist periods of American history white saviors rose to the occasion.”
by Dr. Marsha Cole
Article Reprint
Last weekend, I sat in a movie theatre packed with white people who had brought their children to see the box office hit, Hidden Figures. Hidden Figures topped the number one movie chart for two weeks in a row. This is the untold story of Katherine G. Johnson (played by Taraji P Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae) — brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. The Glenn launch invigorated the US space competition against the space program of the rival USSR. Despite an incredible cast, screenplay and music score the more I thought about the assumptions of the movie, the more I realized that something was very wrong.